Category Archives: is quoque

Here’s the setup for a meta-tu quoque. Stage 1: A makes crazy claim. Stage 2: B criticizes A for crazy claim. Stage 3: A defends A’s claim by noting B’s criticism is based on a double-standard. Stage 4: B notes that A, in charging a double-standard, employs a double standard. I’ve noted elsewhere here at the NS that some forms of double-standard arguments are relevant and argumentatively appropriate. (And John, Colin, and I also published a paper on it a year ago.)

OK, so here’s application. Stage 1: Brian Kilmeade of Fox News said he wouldn’t support the Syrian opposition groups, because they say “Allahu Akbar” when they score military successes. Stage 2: John McCain criticizes Kilmeade for Islamophobia. (Here’s the Huffpo review of the exchange.) Stage 3: George Neumayr at AmSpec defends Kilmeade noting that McCain’s criticism deploys a double standard:

When Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said on Tuesday that he didn’t want to back Syrian rebels who scream “Allahu Akbar!” after bombing buildings, McCain, revealing the Islamophilia behind America’s Arab-Spring foreign policy, replied that those chants don’t bother him. “They are moderates,” he said, dismissing the chants as no more “offensive” than a Christian who says “thank God.” Too bad Kilmeade didn’t ask McCain to give examples of Christians yelling “thank God” after slitting someone’s throat.

The first trouble is that Kilmeade is taking the speech act performed after a horrible deed to be identify the perpetrator as representative of the group that speech act indicates. So because a Muslim terrorist says “Allahu Akbar” after a terrorist incident, those who say “Allahu Akbar” are dangerous radicals. McCain’s reply is by way of counter-examples – Christians say “Thank God” all the time… that’s what the phrase is analogous to. Neumayr’s case is that McCain’s double standard is not to take extreme behavior as representative.

Here’s stage 4: Religious man murders his friend after his friend tells him he’s an atheist. We don’t take that as representative, do we?

We’ve had a number of discussions here at the NS about how ad hominem tu quoque can sometimes actually be a relevant form of argument. (See one of mine HERE, Colin on it HERE, John on it HERE, and my publication on it at ILHERE) In short: the argument form, when properly presented, can show in speaker inconsistency: incompetence, insincerity, or evidence that a proposed practice is impractical. I have one that seems a glaring case of insincerity. Thomas Sowell’s syndicated piece (here at the American Spectator) is that because liberals control (most of) education, there’s no actual fact-checking from critics of conservatives. Instead, all liberals do, from his experience, is give counter-assertions, and that’s what’s supported by the educational institutions producing them. Well, at least that’s what happened when Sowell read an email from a liberal critic.

It is good to check out the facts — especially if you check out the facts on both sides of an issue…. By contrast, another man simply denounced me because of what was said in that column. He did not ask for my sources but simply made contrary assertions, as if his assertions must be correct and therefore mine must be wrong.

He identified himself as a physician, and the claims that he made about guns were claims that had been made years ago in a medical journal — and thoroughly discredited since then. He might have learned that, if we had engaged in a back and forth discussion, but it was clear from his letter that his goal was not debate but denunciation. That is often the case these days.

OK. So Sowell got an email from someone with outdated information. From a medical journal, but outdated information. Well, that’s not so bad, is it? Apparently so, because Sowell takes this email to be representative of how liberals think:

If our educational institutions — from the schools to the universities— were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences.

Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness.

Well, first, I smell weak manning here — thanks, Tomas Sowell, for picking a bad arguer for a liberal talking point and generalizing to all liberals. Perhaps we could do the same for you and use Michele Bachman as the representative voice for conservatism?

At this point, Sowell then turns to the institutions that produce what he takes to be shoddy arguments, that is, universities. And he’s got one case in point:

The student at Florida Atlantic University who recently declined to stomp on a paper with the word “Jesus” on it, as ordered by the professor, was scheduled for punishment by the university until the story became public and provoked an outcry from outside academia.

Ah, but then there’s the old fact-checking, getting the other side’s version of the story. You know, like what a well-educated person would do. The exercise did take place, but the student who refused wasn’t up for punishment for not stepping on ‘Jesus’, but for threatening the professor with violence. And that’s where we know that Sowell’s not playing fair – when his side gets criticized, he wants his critics to be entirely up to date on all the details of the matter. And when they aren’t, well, that’s evidence of how stupid, horribly educated, and disinterested in actual debate they are. But when it’s his side, well, it’s just a matter of saying what his favored audience wants.

A final question, but now about the FAU case: why would Christians care about stepping on the word ‘Jesus’? The name’s not holy. The letters aren’t either. This strikes me as another case of hypocrisy — they’ve got their own graven images. The name of god in their own language. Christians who threaten Professor Poole with death over this don’t understand their own religion.

At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.

"I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox."

My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.

This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies.

The paradox of the Internet age is that never before have we had access to more ideas and different thoughts. And yet, many of us retreat into comfy parlors where everyone agrees and the other side is always wrong. Each side can manufacture its truths and get the chorus to sing along.

Both sides do it! Like the tu quoque, the is or eiquoque has conditions of relevance. In this case, it is not relevant that "both sides do x" because the question concerns whether some fact f is true. We can take it for granted, in any case, that all facts find homes in someone's advocacy.

At this point I was going to quote a section from Paul Krugman's column yesterday, but for some reason, every time I paste the passage into the piece, it deletes my entire post. Can anyone explain this? New York Times time bomb? Here's the link. The passage, despite the Times' paywall, is worth reading in this regard. Or tl:dr: ei quoque is an empirical question. In its usual employment, he argues, it's just not the case. Here is a better example anyway. Two sit-ins on the Hannity Show do the usual everyone is biased against conservatives segment. And they come up with the following thought experiment:

BOZELL: How long do you think Sean Hannity's show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead? Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does. Everybody on the left would come forward and demand he be fired within five minutes for being so insulting towards a leader of the United States.

And so it goes. Chris Matthews called Newt Gingrich a car bomber, therefore I'll call the President a skinny, ghetto crackhead. Ei quoque; ei quoque. There's always an ei quoque.

BTW, anyone a Latinist who prefers ille quoque to is quoque (mutatis mutandis)?